Latin American Philosophy:Race, Liberation, Critical Theory

University of Oregon, Eugene, 2010Nythamar “Nita” de Oliveira

Research Projects (1995-2010)

Comparative study of theories of justice & democracy in Kant, Rawls, Habermas, and Honneth (1995-2008)

Contributions of Dussel, Schutte, Gracia, Foucault, Habermas, and Honneth to a social philosophy of race

Reflective Equilibrium & the System-Lifeworld NexusLatin American Phenomenology of Liberation (2009-)The normative grounds of a critical theory of liberationThe phenomenological deficit of critical theory

Supported by: Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung,CNPq , Capes, PUCRS

Latin-American Philosophy of Race The historical experience of racism• “Let any one who doubts the evil of this mixture of

races, and is inclined, from a mistaken philanthropy, to break down all barriers between them, come to Brazil. He [sic] cannot deny the deterioration consequent upon an amalgation of races, more wide-spread than in any other country in the world, and which is rapidly effacing the best qualities of the white man, the Negro, and the Indian, leaving a mongrel nondescript type, deficient in physical and mental energy.” (Louis Agassiz, 1865)

Imperial Eyes vs. Transculturation:Race, Gender, Class in Latin America

• “I am told here that nothing but severity will answer in the treatment of slaves; that they always must know that the whip is over them... It is amid circumstances such as these that one may become enamored of the ideal communities of socialism, and when men such as [Amos Bronson] Alcott seem like the saviors and high-priests of the earth... How beautiful appear to me associated brotherhoods on the earth, with all their extravagance of love, when compared with a social state in which human powers are so awfully abused, and human rights trampled under foot!”(Fredrika Bremer, 1851)

Latin American Liberation Philosophy and the Other (the poor, women,blacks,indigenous)

“Another World is Possible”• Globalization: a neoliberal imposition “from above”?• World Social Forum from 2001 through 2010• Challenge of integrating Liberation and

Development, • Sustainable • Development and • Social Responsibility, State reforms, and the

participatory engagement of civil society.

Philosophy of Race, Liberation Philosophy, Critical Theory

• Guiding thesis : The fate of democracy and the future of liberation in Latin America are bound to our own self-understanding of the correlative concepts of race, ethnicity, and cultural identity –as well as of gender and environmental conceptions.

• An empirical, historical constatation and a normative, phenomenological statement.

• Race cannot be dissociated from a critique of power and a social, historical ontology.

A phenomenology of liberation

• A weak social constructionism between the objectivist claims of Marxism in liberation philosophy and subjectivist “representations” of postcolonial and cultural studies.

• The future of liberation philosophy in Latin America hinges upon the very fate of democracy, itself bound to the ups and downs of globalized capitalism in developing societies

• A phenomenological-pragmatic perspectivism

Weak Social Constructionism• "race is not a scientific fact but a social,

cultural & ideological construction" (Andrews)• not to merely equate race and ethnicity• a Latin American philosophy of race aims at

both deconstructing racial democracy myths (which is in itself a deconstruction of scientific, historical conceptions of race) and liberating narratives (deconstruction of Eurocentric myths of liberation, including democracy, liberalism, and socialism)

Liberation Philosophy & Critical Theory

• recasts Marx, Nietzsche, and Foucault's hermeneutics of suspicion in normative-agonistic terms that take into account the mixed blessings of critical theory both in the agonistic, negative dialectics of first-generation exponents (Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, Bloch, Marcuse) and in the normative claims of social philophers of the 2nd and 3rd generations(Habermas, Honneth)

Race and Ethnicity in Latin-American Philosophy :The Myth of Racial Democracy

• José Martí, Nuestra América (1891)• José Enrique Rodó, Ariel (1900)• José Vasconcelos, La Raza Cósmica (1925)• Gilberto Freyre, Casa Grande & Senzala (1933)

Latin American Indigenous Peoples

• ethnic, racial makeup in terms of the ideas of mestizaje, mixed races and miscegenation

• Bartolomé de las Casas (16th cent.)• Rigoberta Menchú, Darcy Ribeiro (20th cent.)

Native Peoples of South America:Mameluca, Kapirapé, Quechua (Shaman)

The Spectacularization of Cannibalism : Antropofagia

Race, Mestizaje and Self-Identities

• "to be a mestizo is clearly not to begin from the experience of racelessness... the Latin American struggle to liberate oneself and one's community through the subversive reinterpretation of mestizo identity is much more akin to the struggles of African Americans than it is to the in-between experience faced by Hispanic immigrants to the United States." (Velazco y Trianosky, "Mestizaje and Hispanic Identity," Companion)

J. Glasgow, A Theory of Race (2009)

• recast the normative grounds of the semantic-ontological problem of race

• Racial Reconstructionism as a third-way substitutionism between the Anti-Realism of eliminativist conceptions of race (i.e. that we should eliminate race-thinking entirely, e.g. Appiah, Blum, Corlett, Zack) and the Realism of anti-eliminativist Racial Conservationism (Du Bois, Outlaw, Sundstrom, Taylor)

Revisiting Glasgow’s Theory of Race

• “the race debate is about whether to eliminate or conserve contemporary, public, folk racial discourse.”

• what do we mean by “race” today?• phenomenological correlation: ontological,

intersubjective, and semantic-linguistic axes of lifeworld (Lebenswelt) and practical interplays of the familiar and the strange (Heimwelt and Fremdwelt)so as to rescue its normative thrust

Contra moral realism and taking cultural relativism seriously

• Anti-realism in ethics & political philosophy is correlated to the historical realism of events & social institutions: weak social constructionism is anti-realist to the extent that it refuses universalism, it resists essentialism, and it refers back to the empirical realism of particular, historical facts and social ontology: "there are no scientific facts about race that support the ordinary concept of race. There are historical facts about 'race' as a social concept."(Zack, Race and Mixed Race, p. 10)

Darcy Ribeiro’s 3 Lat Am peoples

"Testimony Peoples"(Peru, Bolivia and Mexico)

"New Peoples"(Chile, Brazil Colombia, Venezuela etc.)

"Transplantated Peoples" (Argentina and Uruguay, essentially European)

The critique of the conquest: "implicit" Liberation Philosophy (1510–53)

• The philosophical justification of the first emancipation (1750–1830)

• The "third Liberation Philosophy being articulated now" (since 1969)

• Antecedents: José Carlos Mariátegui (1920s) and the Cuban Revolution of 1959

• 1969 – 1973: "stage of constitution"• 1973 – 1976: "the stage of maturation"• 1976 – 1983: "the stage of persecution"• "stage of growth & response to new problematics"

The Frankfurt Connection

Enrique Dussel: World-Systems

Dussel & the Critique of Power

-Dussel’s critique of Habermas’s Ideologiekritik and Lebenswelt-System-Dussel’s critique of postmodernist readings of Foucault & CriticalTheory

- Foucault & Habermas’s insights into the technological transformations that revolutionized our geopolitical, juridical views of society, socialization, and power relations (critique of power)- Foucault and Honneth have renewed a pragmatist approach to self-development and intersubjective accounts of alterity and recognition

Ofelia Schutte’s Latin American Critical Philosophy of Liberation

"understand the relationship between liberation, cultural identity, and Latin American social reality from the standpoint of a historically rooted critical philosophy... to provide methods of critical analysis and models for practical action [...so as] to defend the cultural, political, and economic integrity of the people of the region.“Critique of Dussel's totalizing, dualistic approach to the task of liberation (according to which the Other's morally good alterity must overcome the absolute evil of the dominating Totality), and of the materialist Marxist analysis that tends to overlook race/gender within systemic oppression.

The future of democracy• J. Habermas,"Three Normative Models of

Democracy" (in Seyla Benhabib, Democracy and Difference, Princeton Univ. Press, 1996)

• Habermas’s proceduralist democracy • liberal (J. Locke, J. Rawls) and republican

models (J.-J. Rousseau, H. Arendt)• Axel Honneth’s reflexive democracy• Latin American deconstruction of myths of

racial democracy; agonistic, ethnic models

A Phenomenology of Liberation:Ontology, Intersubjectivity, Language

Pragmatic Perspectivism

Latin American Philosophy:Race, Liberation, Critical Theory

Schutte's perspectival and Gracia's metaphysical approaches as non-essentialist takes on race and ethnicity, not only in Latin America but also in the US, help us move towards what would be a Pan-American conception of

Hispanic or Latino identity, or a Latino pan-identity in the very quest of liberation. If a wide reflective equilibrium allows for such a pan-ethnic

identity within different comprehensive views, say, of mixed-raced Native Americans, Amerindians, Afro-Latin, African-Americans, mulattos, zambos

and others, we come full circle in our own attempt to establish the correlation of ontology, subjectivity, and language.

The Myth of Racial Democracy• Gilberto Freyre, Casa-Grande e Senzala, 1933 (ET: The

Masters and the Slaves)• Recast Brazil’s authoritarian lifeworld and colonial

slaveholding past• “Critique of pure race” & scientific racism• In praise of miscegenation & mixed races: mestizo,

mulatto, pardo, moreno, zambo• Frank Tannenbaum, Slave & Citizen (1946)• Carl Degler, Neither Black Nor White (1971)• Cultural Relativism (Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict)

France Twine: White Supremacy and Racialized Pathologies in L.Am.• Whitening ideology “was originally coined by

the [Latin American] elite to reconcile theories of scientific racism with the reality of the predominantly nonwhite population of their country”

• Afro-Latin American children systematically disempowered as they learn not to talk about racism, regarded as a taboo subject for discussion with their parents and peers.

Why Race Matters in Latin American Philosophy

• Cultural browning, whitening ideologies and Europeanization as social pathologies, crystallized in racist and racialized conceptions betray the relevance and the inescapability of race in public discussions about inequalities in Latin America and in shaping democracy.

• "If race truly did not matter ... we would not need these data." (Andrews, 2004, p. 206 f.)

Muchísimas Gracias!

Morales, Lula, Bachelet

Pragmatic Perspectivism:A Phenomenology of Liberation

Social Ontology

Alterity Recognition

Intersubjectivity Language

Justice

Liberation